Optimizing Performance and Scalability

In this chapter, you will learn about performance and optimization and how to improve your application as your user base starts to grow. You will learn a variety of tips on how to improve your app’s overall performance, scalability, and the user experience (UX). We will cover some of the best practices and provide advice for efficient app design, performance, and scalability, covering strategies to handle databases and workflows and creating interfaces that resonate with users and provide a pleasant experience that also impacts the perceived performance of your application.

This chapter is a toolkit to optimize your Bubble applications for superior performance, scalability, and user satisfaction. Let’s dive in!

By the end of this chapter, you’ll have gained a comprehensive understanding of optimization methods and how to improve your application performance to allow it to scale and grow.

In this chapter, we’...

Why is performance important?

It might sound obvious that performance is important, but why exactly? Performance is crucial to app development as it directly impacts user satisfaction and engagement. No one wants to wait for a page to load or spend too much time figuring out how something works; it must be fast and intuitive. A well-performing application ensures seamless UXs, fast response times, and efficient use of your app. Remember – your app should be a solution to someone else’s problem, not another problem. Moreover, performance optimization contributes to enhanced reliability and scalability, allowing your app to grow and accommodate increasing user demands without sacrificing functionality or speed. A strong foundation is important to allow you to grow as you go.

Key points to consider for app performance include the following:

• Fast response times improve user satisfaction and engagement
• Seamless UXs lead to higher retention rates
• Efficient...

UX and UI tips – best practices for your app design

UX and UI are integral aspects of app design that significantly influence user engagement and retention. If you are not a design expert, the most important thing is to not reinvent the wheel. Follow existing design patterns, and don’t get too creative in this area; remember that people are used to using the web already. Build things that are already familiar and like other existing websites so that the users don’t have to learn how your app works entirely from scratch. If you can, hire an expert to help you; a UX/UI designer can help you a lot in this process. If you can’t hire someone, at least try to simplify the app idea, make the design simpler, or use a good and well-designed premade template; be careful with the bad ones as well. When using templates, also make sure you don’t break them or make them look bad. Again, search for references and best practices; we will cover some of the basics...

Efficient database usage – improving workflows and queries

In this section, you will learn how to improve database queries and workflows to improve your app’s performance. Part of this process is understanding the key concepts involved and the mindset, and part of it is implementing a few specific practical techniques to reduce the app loading time and improve performance when using databases and workflows inside your Bubble application.

The mindset

Now, let’s start with the mindset part. The key here is to make it simple; of course, this is obvious advice, but trust me – it is very easy to overcomplicate and overengineer an application; your goal will be to focus on how to create things in a simple and minimized way. When talking about workflows, how can you reduce the number of steps? How can you reuse similar actions in different parts of the application? How can you make it less complex? When talking about databases, how can you make the database...

How to minimize page load times

Minimizing page load time is one of the ways to improve your application performance, and there are a lot of little things you can do to make sure your page loads faster. When your page loads faster, your user will perceive your application to be more responsive and smoother. This sensation gives the user the understanding that your application is performing well. Note that you can also use techniques to improve the perceived loading time, which in some cases doesn’t necessarily mean your application is loading faster in reality, but the users will think it is loading faster due to the strategies applied, and in some scenarios, that can be enough to deliver a seamless or better UX while using your application.

Think of page loading time as a telephone call. Your web application is running on the user’s browser, which is their telephone. When they type in your website URL, they are calling the server – in our case, Bubble –...

Is it possible to scale your Bubble app? Real examples

The quick answer is yes, but at the same time, no. How is this possible? Well, an app that isn’t built for scale simply won’t scale. And sometimes that is OK; the plan was to validate something and get things done, not to scale. But if scalability is your goal, then yes – you can prioritize that and build it to scale. Accommodating a growing user base and increasing traffic requires careful planning and execution. Scaling a Bubble app, especially in the context of a start-up, should become a concern; otherwise, you might be building a scalable app that will never get there. To scale an app, you will have to keep improving it and making it perform well as the user base grows, as you decide to prioritize it. But it is possible. This is the reality with code or no-code. Trust me Bubble won’t be your only concern when growing and scaling a company. Although it might seem a tricky road, it is possible; you...

Scaling your Bubble app for increased traffic

Each app and company will have a different process, a different application, and a specific scenario when they need to scale; sometimes, scalability doesn’t necessarily mean only handling more users accessing your application but also hiring more people on your team. Most of the time, people are worried about the software but forget other areas of the company that also need to scale as the company grows, so have that in mind as well. Sometimes, your biggest concern won’t be the tools or the software but hiring and training people, improving support, sales, customer success, onboarding, moving to a new location, creating new areas of your company, and so on. Many of these things can come before you actually need to invest more in software growth itself. Another common scenario is entrepreneurs worrying about scalability when they are in the initial early stage of their start-up, as if in a matter of days this would become a...

External databases as an alternative option

Bubble has an internal database you can use to build your applications; this means you don’t necessarily need to use an external database in most cases. The internal database is very powerful and flexible, but it does have some limitations, which can be overcome when you use an external database. As a developer, it is important you know about the limitations and also alternative database options so that you have alternatives to choose from when you build your applications.

Bubble’s database limitations

As with any tool or resource, Bubble also has its limitations. Even code has limitations; some might say no-code is limited as an excuse to not use it or favor other solutions, but the truth is that everything has limitations and we just have to deal with them, or at least know them to, when needed, overcome them and find solutions. Here are a few of the existing limitations you can be aware of inside Bubble:

• Data...

Basic tips to improve your app’s overall performance

In the previous chapters, you learned a lot of different methods, tools, and techniques to test your app’s performance. You decided to run some tests and discovered your application performance is not great. What to do now? When facing issues with performance in a Bubble app, implementing basic optimization tips can help improve the efficiency and performance of your app. Let’s take a look at them:

• Simplifying workflows: Make sure workflows have fewer steps and run faster. Reduce the number of workflows by creating reusable ones. If an action will take too much time to load, run it in the background and let the users come back to the action later. Don’t forget to properly communicate about it.
• Minimizing database queries: The bigger the query is, the more data you require, or the more filters you add and the bigger the data size, the more time it will take to load. Try to break queries into...

Summary

In this chapter, we delved into optimizing performance and scalability. We explored crucial aspects of UX and design, emphasizing the importance of building user-friendly interfaces through efficient practices. You also learned about workflows, databases, and queries and how to optimize them to improve your app’s overall performance. Scaling strategies and techniques were discussed to prepare your Bubble application for increased traffic. Additionally, you learned techniques to minimize page load times. Understanding these concepts is key to helping you create robust, scalable, and high-performing applications.

We have now come to the end of this book!

Here are a few tips for you to consider after finishing the book:

• Never stop learning! The journey has just begun, and there’s a vast ocean of knowledge waiting to be explored. Keep pushing your boundaries and embracing new challenges.
• Put theory into action by embarking on your first real project...

Further reading

• Bubble manual – performance and scaling
• https://manual.bubble.io/help-guides/maintaining-an-application/performance-and-scaling
• Bubble blog article – planning tips
• https://bubble.io/blog/improve-web-app-performance/#tip-2-planning-is-essential
• Bubble manual – Scaling with Bubble
• https://manual.bubble.io/help-guides/infrastructure/hosting-and-scaling/scaling-with-bubble
• UX book – Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
• UX book – The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman